In Australia, schools are nut free zones. You can’t send anything with nuts in school lunches. I’m still not used to this, and it saddens me that kids are growing without the taste of nuts daily. One of my favourites, and one of chocolate’s favourites, is the hazelnut.
One of the reasons that I organised my trip to Turin was because it is close to one of Italy’s most famous hazelnut regions, the Nocciola del Piemonte grown in the hills of Langhe-Roero and Monferrato. These are considered one of the best hazelnuts to pair with chocolate because they have a crunchy flesh, long shelf life and amazing flavour, especially when roasted. Piedmont is the only place in the world where these particular trees have been able to grow. They are sweet compared to the more woody, bitter hazelnuts grown in bulk. This is why these hazelnuts are protected with an IGP designation which identifies agricultural and food products that originate in an area “in which at least one of the production phases takes place and to which are attributable: quality, reputation and other important special characteristics”.
Here the hazelnut culture is strong. The Confraternita della Nocciola (Brotherhood of Hazelnuts) is a group that not only promotes the nuts but organises the Sagra della Nocciola IGP Piemonte, an international hazelnut festival. There are of course hazelnuts coming from other regions of Italy, each with their own unique flavour profile including Campania, Sicily, Liguria and Lazio.
The challenge when something becomes popular is that things start to change. While hazelnuts have been grown for thousands of years in Italy, today this is intensifying and monoculture practices are being brought in to grow more and more of them, much to the concern of environmentalist who say it is being cultivated in an unsustainable way. This causes issues with the water, soil and air through chemical fertilizers that spread into the air and water impacting local ecosystems. With the global demand for Ferrero’s Nutella it seems everything is being replaced with hazelnuts. Under their Italian Nut Project, they have plans to boost national production of hazelnuts by 30 percent to 90,000 hectares by 2025. While this means more Nutella for you, it isn’t necessarily such good news for farmers.
To satisfy demands, Ferrero has increasingly been buying Turkish hazelnuts. Turkey is the world’s largest producer (69% in 2019 – Spain, the US and Greece also produce some). While reading into this further, there are many accounts of farmers being underpaid for their nuts there and that, in the case of one report, the company “is abusing its near monopoly to force down prices”. Needless to say, hazelnuts are complex. This is the story with so many products we buy; there is the good and the bad sides. Sometimes we have control over how this story evolves (for example, supporting gianduja when visiting Turin or pressuring big companies), sometimes it is much harder.
Whichever hazelnuts you buy, choose the freshest ones (locally produced if you can). Be aware of the origin of the hazelnuts you are buying. They will all taste slightly different. Open the shells using a nutcracker and then place the nuts on a baking sheet in the oven for 10-12 minutes at 180C. Once cooled, you can then just rub off the dark skin. You can eat these raw…but they taste better roasted and even better paired with chocolate. They have a high fat content which means they will go bad quickly so refrigerate them. Click here to read my post on how to turn them into Gianduja.
Click here to read all about my trip to Turin, the home of hazelnuts.
